Saturday, January 19, 2013

Garden gobbling

One of my monsters is prone to dinner avoidance. This is not particularly unusual in children - common as dirt, in fact. The undesirable list is a shifting sand of some vegetables, complex flavours and "spicy food". This last term includes everything from chilli fandangos, the mild application of cumin and things with a sour lemon taste.

Surely these things are poisonous?

Her favourite lurk is to pick at tea in a listless manner, all the while claiming she is exhasted and not hungry. Then after tea she will go and snack in the garden. She was bolting berries for a while but the crops have passed. Lately it has been cherry tomatoes and she has just realised the plums are almost ripe. Mind you, with only 15 squinchy plums on the tree-ette, she is not getting many days out of them, especially if the parrots or possums catch on.

Then at breakfast, she will eat the usual and claim she is still starving and can she have another round. That ferret!

She is nothing on the other monster. When the O.M. was a toddler, she would pick at food in a grumpy manner for 4 or 5 days, waiting for a meal she liked to come around. Then she would eat like a boa constrictor faced with a tasty-looking goat. I am not sure if this cycle is good for a child's digestion but we weren't about to give in to her dietary preferences.

You had to give her credit for stubborness, though. Combined with the terrible number of ear infections she had, it also had the side effect of zooming away her baby fat.

I watched several episodes of some reality show about adults with bizarre and restrictive food habits. It took quite a bit or wrangling with dietiticians and psychologists to get them on the path to a healthy diet. It confirmed my feeling that there is only a short hop between a fussy toddler and an adult who only eats carbs, dairy and fruit. The war continues.